It had to come some time A monthly overview of interesting tweets that deserve to be mentioned on our blog. Enjoy and please let us know what you think!

Conferences

Don’t miss out on a chance to hear professor Oinas-Kukkonen, BJ Fogg and our own Maurits Kaptein as keynote speakers at Persuasive12 in Linköping, Sweden from 6-8 June.

Articles

The Billion Dollar Mind Trick: An Intro to Triggers
We’re excited to see that our good buddy Jason Hreha (former student at the Stanford Persuasive Technology lab) started sharing his knowlegde with the world even more! If you’re interested in the field of persuasive technology, Jason should be on your radar.

Personalized Persuasion in Ambient Intelligence
Duh. A bit longer article (some would call it a PhD thesis) that deserves an award…

Habits Are The New Viral: Why Startups Must Be Behavior Experts
Cool new take on successful startups and behavioral sciences.

Transforming Behaviour Change
Jonathan Rowson challenges us and proposes an alternative approach to behaviour change.

Behavior Change as Value Proposition
Adaptive Path’s Chris Rindon discusses some interesting questions: Where does persuasion live? How do we recognize these products in the wild? And what has caused the tipping point for the growth of these products and services?

Video
Rory Sutherland, one of the most respected business thinkers, on influence. Enough said.

Here are the slides of the Keynote talk Maurits gave at #Conversion12:

We are more than proud to announce that Maurits defended his PhD thesis with success yesterday. For his new approach of persuasion he was awarded the Cum Laude honors. Which we think is pretty neat.

The committee of professors were convinced of the importance of his research and supported the following propositions related to Maurits’ thesis: Personalized Persuasion in Ambient Intelligence:

1. Previous responses of an individual to an influence attempt are more predictive for subsequent responses than the average response of others. [Thesis, chapter 3]
2. A request supported by a single influence strategy will often lead to higher compliance than that same request supported by numerous influence strategies. [Thesis, chapter 4]
3. Persuasive systems that attend to individual differences in the effects of persuasion attempts will perform at least as good as static systems. [Thesis, chapter 8]
4. Persuasion profiles based on behavioral responses will become a valuable marketing asset. [Thesis]

If you are interested in the whole Thesis. Let us know on twitter and we will make sure you’ll get a copy (or download it here).

For a master class (lead by our cofounder Maurits Kaptein) on persuasion profiling we have invited Dean Eckles to Amsterdam. Dean Eckles is doing his PhD at Stanford and works as a researcher-in-residence at Facebook. You probably know him for his scientific work with Maurits in the field of persuasion profiling.

This is more than enough reason to organize an informal meetup. The night before the masterclass we invite you to come and have a drink with us (the first beers and snacks are on us) and shake hands with Dean & Maurits. Dean & Maurits will also give a persuasion profiling update.

Where and when
Sky Lounge
Oosterdoksstraat 4, Amsterdam
February 29 from 18:00 to 20:00

We have only a limited number of seats, so email us if you want come (first come, first served).

And we invite you to check out Dean’s blog or say hi on twitter: @deaneckles.

Hope to see you 29 February.

We will be up and about the coming months. We would love to meet up and have a beer. So let us know if you attend one of the events below:

16 February – IUI Lisbon, Portugal  – Talk on Adaptive Persuasion to Reduce Snacking

27 February – 3 March TEDActive Palm Springs, USA (Arjan)
29 February – PersuasionAPI drinks Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Dean Eckles & Maurits)
1 March – Invitation Only Persuasion Profiling Masterclass, Boer & Croon, Amsterdam (Dean Eckles & Maurits)
21 – 22 March Digital Marketing Live! Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Improving Conversion through Persuasion (Maurits)

28 March – Stratmark Helsinki, Finland – Talk on Persuasion Profiling (Maurits)
29 March – PhD Defense Eindhoven, the Netherlands – Maurits’ PhD defense (Arjan)
12 April – Emerce Conversion Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Persuasion Profiling Keynote (Maurits)
7 May – Computer Human Interaction Austin, Texas, USA – Talk on Statistics for HCI (Maurits)

As you might know PersuasionAPI was born out of scientific work done by Maurits Kaptein. With the discovery of Persuasion Profiling Maurits earned his PhD (which he will receive the end of March). This first Persuasion Profiling API wasn’t ready for commercial use though. Last months some very talented people joined us (more on that in a later post) that helped rebuild the API that is based on the scientific work Maurits did at Stanford.

We went from first in the world to out of this world.

Persuasion Profiling Roadmap
This is our Future Roadmap that we will explain later in the year.

Beta Offer

And this is our current Beta offer.

If you are interested in becoming a beta client let us know and we will explain in detail what it means to be on the front row of persuasion profiling.

Source: MediaCom

What kind of shopper are you? Do you always buy the most popular items? Do you look to see what your friends are buying? Do you look at the newspaper reviews before buying a new book?

Questions like these lie at the heart of a new set of techniques that are just starting to be applied to e-commerce, lifestyle changes and almost any facet of your life.

Such “persuasion profiles” differ from the personal recommendations we know and, sometimes love, from Amazon and iTunes, which are based on purchase patterns and behaviour on site, in that they are based on an understanding of our psychology rather than the relevance of a particular book or music track.

They are also a step beyond online behavioural targeting in that they detail not what we have been looking at but rather what messages we are likely to respond to.

What “persuasion profiles” potentially tell brands and governments is whether you are more likely to respond to a message based on authority, whether you are more likely to respond to scarcity or whether you are more likely to respond positively to someone you like?

They can be applied across all aspects of your behaviour and ultimately could become tradable data valued on the basis of their ability to boost conversion rates and improve take-up of other changes desired by governments, service providers and campaigners.

In essence, they are the digital equivalent of the salesperson’s skill in sizing up a customer and working out what message about his or her product is most likely to convince them to buy. But while their use on a one to one basis is as old as the human race, their widespread adoption and automated inclusion in communications raises a number of wider issues.

Read full article at MediaCom.

The transcript of this talk is available here.

This is the transcript of Maurit’s TEDx talk he gave last Tuesday. We will share the video once it’s available.

Persuasion and why we fail to predict it

The goal of science is to understand and predict the world around us. Why do trees grow? Why do things fall down, and why do people do the things they do?

Ever since I was twelve I have been intrigued by the latter question. I was, and still am, a skateboarder. Which means that, next to skateboarding, I wear baggy pants and skateboard brand t-shirts. However, when I first started doing this I had a hard time understanding which t-shirt was actually the “right” t-shirt.
Even though to me a lot of t-shirts were similar, some where a definite no-go area. More specifically, I found, and still find, myself buying 40 euro t-shirts that in all fairness are not any better than the 5 euro ones. However, they are the “right” t-shirts. Those that make you fit in.

Read the rest of this entry »

As published in the latest ACM Interactions:

Eleven-year-old Joey has resisted following his doctor’s weight-loss plan—skipping his daily bike ride to play video games, trading his healthy lunches for soft drinks, and sneaking snacks at night. His dad, Martin, is frustrated. Joey seems frustrated, too. Concerned about some recent bullying, Martin goes online to check the parental-control settings on his son’s social network account. He then sees something he’s never noticed before: Joey’s persuasion profile. During his extensive use of the site, Joey has been shown countless ads for products, games, and other websites. Each time the persuasion profile recorded Joey’s response: Did he click the ad? Did he play the game? Reading on, Martin learns that Joey rarely acts on recommendations from experts or celebrities but likes what his peers like and does what his peers do. Martin thinks, I wonder if we could use that to help Joey. He finds an online weight-loss program that helps kids motivate each other by sharing their successes.

Source: ACM Interactions Magazine

Persuasion profiles are sets of estimates of the effectiveness of particular influence strategies on individuals, based on their past responses to these strategies. In Joey’s case, this profile indicates he is much more receptive to the consensus strategy (I do as others do) than to the authority strategy (I do as authorities say). Persuaders can use this profile to automatically or manually select the most effective strategy for their target. This process is different from existing forms of behavioral adaptation— for example, recommender systems used by websites like Amazon.com—in that the same influence strategies can apply across different domains, from selling books to promoting physical activity. While knowing that Joey likes superhero comics might help Amazon sell him books, this information is unlikely to be helpful for addressing his obesity. By contrast, a persuasion profile could be used both to sell books and promote healthy behavior.

Read full article.